Creating online scrapbooks for museums
The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) reported that a group of the United Kingdom’s most famous museums, including the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum, is planning to create a collective website.
This way, museum lovers can check out the website to share their cultural passions, find out more information about exhibits, and create communities based on historic and creative interests.
The project called The National Museums Online Learning project, is a £1.5M Treasury-funded project. It also involves the National Portrait Gallery, Natural History Museum, the Tate, the Wallace Collection, Royal Armouries, Sir John Soane's Museum and Imperial War Museum.
Given the sheer collections of these museums, it is no wonder that they are visited by tens of millions of visitors each year.
There is an online meeting place where visitors can search across the combined collections, set up social networking groups for discussions, and collect scrapbooks of images and share these images to other users.
To inspire schools to join in discussions and participate, the website included "WebQuests," which allowed students to investigate the combined resources of the museums. Any class studying Queen Victoria, for example, can check out paintings from the National Portrait Gallery website, get information on her clothing from the Victoria and Albert Museum website, and view historic objects from the British Museum website.
The website uses scrapbooking, a popular hobby which traditionally involves paper, glue and tape. With the onset of online options, digital scrapbooking can be used to gather photos, resources and videos from museums and make it available to the public.
Here are some scrapbooking websites that can help:
- ClipClip.org – lets users keep snippets of Web pages for personal use or for group use. This is similar to the traditional scrapbooking method of cutting out newspaper clippings and pasting them on books. This way, the online museum can now have clippings of web pages relevant to the topic or collection.
- CropMom.com – allows users to make scrapbook pages based around photos and download them in various formats. These can be photos of an artifact or scanned copies of old photos.
- Famento.com – lets users create clean pages built around memorabilia or artifact to be shared to groups, classes and schools.
- JessicaSprague.com – has digital scrapbooking tutorials as well as free software tool downloads and scrapbooking materials.
- OneTrueMedia.com – lets users create and edit video montages and scrapbooks.
- Scrapblog.com – lets users create scrapbook pages by dragging and dropping, and featuring integration with numerous services such as Photobucket, Flickr, Myspace, Facebook and so on.
- Scrapo.com – allows use for photo editing tools and drag and drop book creation. There’s also space for group message boards, private messaging and a space to blog in.
- Smilebox.com – has hundreds of templates for photos and videos.
Sources:
Aune, Sean. “10 Resources for Online Scrapbooking.” Retrieved November 25, 2009 from
http://mashable.com/2008/09/16/online-scrapbooking
Coughlan, Sean. “Museum lovers' social networking.” Retrieved November 25, 2009 from
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/education/7902323.stm
(Published 21 December 2009, Smart Communications Inc.)
